Theatre review: Titaníque

Docking at the Criterion after a successful run off-Broadway, Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli and director Tye Blue's Titaníque couldn't call itself Titanic: The Musical because there already is one of them. But where that show tried to tell the story from the perspective of pretty much everyone on the iconic but doomed liner, this is what most people would probably expect from a Titanic musical: A stage adaptation of James Cameron's 1997 film juggernaut about how Kate Winslet liked Leonardo DiCaprio, but not quite enough to give him space on a fairly large door. With added Céline Dion, whose back catalogue makes this a jukebox musical, but who also gives it its deranged framing device: At a Titanic-themed museum, Dion (Lauren Drew) bursts in to announce they've got everything wrong and she should know, because she was there. Ignoring the fact that this would make her at least 150 years old, she proceeds to tell the story.

Theatre review: Hex

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: All the remaining run of Hex has been reclassified as previews.

My most-cancelled show of the Christmas season - I had to reschedule it twice - the National Theatre's new musical Hex has missed so much of its planned run that what's left is now being considered a preview, prior to it returning for what they'll be hoping will be a more successful second try at the end of the year. This is probably for the best - I'd hazard a guess that composer Jim Fortune, book writer Tanya Ronder and lyricist/director Rufus Norris will be giving it a few tweaks between now and then. Whether the promising premise can actually be converted into a hit is another story. Hex applies to Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty the central conceits of two of the most popular fairytale musicals of all time: The revisionist take on a character usually seen as the villain, most famously used in Wicked, and the second act exploring what happens after the Happy-Ever-After, as used in Into the Woods.